Bobby Kareer
Verified Expert in Product Management
Product Manager
Philadelphia, PA, United States
Toptal member since April 6, 2019
For over the past 24 years, Bobby has led the engineering for products in capital markets. He has extensive expertise in building/leading remote teams (from all over including the US, Europe, and Asia), running projects, and developing product ideas within an Agile delivery model. Bobby is also well versed in derivatives transaction processing models, technologies (Java, .NET, N-Tier, microservices, etc.), Scrum, Agile modeling, and architecture.
Project Highlights
Expertise
- Agile Product Management
- Financial Services
- Fintech
- Remote Team Leadership
- Scalable Application
- Scrum
- Technical Project Management
Work Experience
CTO – Application Development
FS Investments
- Owned the overall technology leadership, at an investment management firm with $23 billion of AUM, to enable and deliver operational efficiencies and data-driven insights to all business areas within the firm.
- Led the implementation of a company-wide data management platform leveraging AWS services, managed Spark with data bricks, and managed a data warehouse with Snowflake.
- Led implementation of a company-wide reporting solution using Jasper and Spring Boot on AWS ECS.
- Spearheaded the implementation of enterprise single pane of glass monitoring and alerting platform.
- Oversaw the implementation and the support of investment systems for portfolio management and operations.
- Onboarded systems including BMS Portfolio Management & Compliance, Broadridge OMS, IHS Markit EDM, and Geneva Fund Accounting & Reconciliations.
Head of Engineering
FIS
- Oversaw and was accountable for the quality and timely development and delivery of FS Cleared Derivatives post trade processing solution suite for the middle and back office processing of exchange traded derivatives.
- Led the global development team of over 150 people spread across the globe in Chicago, Paris, Tunisia, Belgrade, and Pune.
- Spearheaded continuous delivery objective on behalf of the transformation leadership team.
- Established the strategic direction for a robust and scalable quality assurance practice.
- Sponsored and critiqued architecture and delivery efficiency investments.
- Championed continuous Agile practice improvements.
- Pioneered domain-specific language to enable robotics process automation.
Head of Engineering (Core Product)
SunGard
- Ran the largest organic build investment (approx. $50 million) in SunGard history to protect and grow a post-trade processing product franchise worth $250 million by modernizing an aging but ubiquitous back office and middle office product suite.
- Built a development team of 100 people between Belgrade and Pune.
- Designed the technical vision in collaboration with product management using BPMN modeling.
- Presented technical architecture vision at company-sponsored roadshows and deep-dive workshops with JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, BNP, Deutsche, Credit Suisse, and Barclays.
- Established Agile working practices by installing coaches, evangelists, and training.
- Delivered products within a framework of continuous integration and automated regression testing.
- Went live with our first early adopter customer to clear securities on the Spanish exchange.
- Negotiated the pricing for third-party technology support providers.
Director of Engineering
SunGard
- Oversaw and was responsible for the product development and support of our bilateral OTC suite of post-trade operations modules.
- Was promoted to lead collateral management product in order to enhance reliability, supportability, and agility in delivering new capabilities.
- Transitioned back office developers to work on our collateral product over a course of six months with a rigorous technical and domain knowledge-sharing program.
- Enhanced all back-office services to be white-labeled and integrable for bundle sales.
- Delivered a collateral optimizer to enable cheapest-to-deliver collateral pledging.
Director of Engineering
SunGard
- Led the product development and ongoing L3 support of our back-office suite of products. The suite covered ISDA freeform, FpML, and SWIFT message generation, cashflow netting and settlements, trading sub-ledger, hedge accounting, and static data management.
- Reduced the KTLO expenditure to 20% of total leaving 80% for new product enhancements and integrations to bundle our offering with other SunGard products.
- Led the development, quality assurance, business analysts, and support teams.
- Participated in RFPs and client presales workshops for enterprise sales.
- Transformed the development practice from Waterfall to Agile.
Chief Technical Architect
SunGard
- Acted as the primary architect of the technical platform components.
- Led the technology transformation from VB and C++ to .NET (C#).
- Spearheaded the SaaS offering by enhancing our entire product suite to be web-service enabled.
Lead Software Developer
SunGard
- Led the modernization and modularization development effort of our legacy APL based back office into a VB/COM-based application.
- Built team of 20 developers, business analysts (BA), and quality assurance analysts (QA) in India.
Software Engineer
SunGard (Devon)
- Transformed our basic static data management VB application into a platform to support a non-programmatic data model extensibility along with a publisher/subscriber capability.
- Was recognized as the biggest contributor to our modernization from a DOS-based system to a Windows-based GUI system using the APL programming language.
Project History
FIS Cleared Derivatives Product Build
Led the full solution development for the FIS Cleared Derivatives product. It was the next-generation solution for middle and back-office post-trade process of exchange-traded derivatives
Education
Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering
Bucknell University - Lewisburg, PA, USA
Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics and Physics
Lycoming College - Williamsport, PA, USA
Skills
Tools
Jira, Git, IntelliJ IDEA, Confluence, Jenkins
Paradigms
Scrum, Agile, Scalable Application, Agile Product Management, Agile Workflow, Microservices, BPMN, Continuous Delivery (CD)
Industry Expertise
Financial Services, Capital Markets
Platforms
MacOS
Other
Product Ownership, Technical Project Management, Remote Team Leadership, Team Leadership, Databases, Windows, Fintech, Product Management, Business Analysis, Requirements, Product Strategy, Product Roadmaps, Go-to-market Plans, User Research, Business Models, Product Design, Product Marketing, Product Frameworks, Innovation, Product Discovery, Product Delivery, Technical Product Management, Java, .NET, NoSQL, Linux, Agile Leadership, Data Warehousing, Scala, COTS, Quality Assurance (QA), Derivatives, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Data Warehouse Design
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